A non-creedal missional community in a progressive ecumenical universalist christian way, 5920 N. Owasso Ave, Turley, OK 74126 918-691-3223, 794-4637, 430-1150. Service. Community. Discipleship. Worship. All are Welcome. See below or Write to revronrobinson@aol.com for the latest gatherings. We often worship with others on Sunday. We hope you respond to the call to service to and with others in an Abandoned Place of the American Dream Marketplace Empire.

Saturday May 26 morning at the community kitchengardenpark,
6005 N. Johnstown Ave., helping in the gardens, harvesting for the food pantry,
putting in your own bed with us.

Sunday morning 9:30 am, Day of Pentecost celebration of the
missional rebirth of the church, and our local expression of it, including
communion and common meal, at the Welcome Table Center, 5920 N. Owasso
Ave.

Thursday evening, 6:30 pm, May 31, neighborhood watch group,
at the Welcome Table Center, and volunteering at the gardenpark to harvest for
the food pantry

Saturday, June 2, 6 pm, join us as we march in the annual
Tulsa Gay Pride Parade downtown, one of the few if not only northside groups to
do so each year.

Sunday, June 3, 9:30 am, our missional community gathering for
study, worship, and common meal, as we celebrate Trinity Sunday, refreshing our
souls and the soul of our community for the service to and with and for others
in our wider community.

Looking ahead: Thursday, June 7, 10 am to noon, our Mobile
Food Van Giveaway Day, volunteers needed, at Cherokee School; it is going to be
a hot day so water, refreshments, and a place of shade for volunteers will be
needed as we give away some 7500 pounds of food in one hour to our
neighbors.

Saturday, June 9, at Horizon Unitarian Universalist Church in
Carrollton, TX, I will be giving the keynote address on "One Mission, Many
Communities: What The Post-Congregational World Requires of Us".

Saturday, June 16, 5-7 pm, come support us at the Odd Fellows
Lodge, 6227 N. Quincy, to our benefit dinner to help us raise funds for our A
Third Place Community Foundation. Help us also hold our monthly benefit dinners
with the Odd Fellows, and help us build community relationships and reflect our
area's increasingly multi-ethnic diversity. Celebrate what we can do working
together, by pausing to break bread together.

Commentary:

So I woke up on the eve of my own 40th high school reunion
from McLain High School in Tulsa, to more bad news about more cuts to common
schools here where we are already 49th of all the states in supporting common
schools, and I thought about what I have been talking a lot about lately, to
classes and on the panel discussions like the wonderful two hour plus
conversation we had for the Tulsa Health Department employees who are about to
come work in our area, all about the continuing fragmentation of community,
especially connected to the fragmentation of our schools, and from that the
fragmentation of lives, especially in our most vulnerable communities and lives.
But today it struck me not just as an assault on common schools and poorer
communities, but as an attack on democracy itself.

For the more we break up communities, the more we make it
difficult for people to come together on common ground, the more we will replace
our lives as members of communities with being commodities for corporations.
The more we forget that all our very missions are to create better communities,
especially for those "least of these", then we will cast away real freedom in
favor of a fake freedom. The real freedom being that which is a reflection of
God's spirit, that which brings people together, that which liberates us from
oppressions, that which is the blessed sacred soil from which souls are grown,
that which is inherently communal. I believe it was for real freedom that so
many died for whom we will, perhaps amid our all our parties on Monday, remember
this Memorial Day. It was not for the fake freedom to do as we will, to live
lives apart from our neighbors, to "die and let die".

So it is that the ultimate mission of our schools is not to
educate children; it is to make our communities healthier and stronger, and
educating children is the way that happens through schools, just as businesses
and churches and civic groups and medical institutions have the same mission and
all do that in their own way, so it is with schools; the very end of educating
children is not for the individual child but for the betterment of the
community. Our slogan should not be just that every child matters, but that
every community matters, for if it did then the education of children would
happen as a natural outgrowth of that focused purpose. When communities become
unhealthy, schools follow suit; to make schools healthier, you don't focus on
individual students and teachers and schools, you focus on the communities; to
do otherwise is to continue on the treadmill and continue doing the same things
you have always done, under new program names, or shuffling personnel, and
expecting different results. But focusing on communities is harder; it means
getting out of our boxes and out of our institutions; it means redistributing
the resources we have; and it is so much harder now that the racism and classism
and attacks on the working class economic base and resulting abandonment of the
area has resegregated and fragmented the community at large and its sense of
identity and purpose here on the far north edge.

A lot of this was brought home at a wonderful grassroots
meeting yesterday as we began at our The Welcome Table Center a process of
creating from the ground up a disaster response network (which will be basis
for doing the same thing for a neighborhood health network and possibly
incorporation itself) for our area as we approach this August the one year
anniversary of the wildfires and evacuations. It struck me during our work how
much things have changed in the community over the years, and not because it is
no longer so ethnically homogenous, but from the loss of community groups,
especially the connections through schools. My father was part of our mapping of
our neighborhoods, and as we went through our areas, I was reminded that once
upon a time, even when we had a thousand more people living in our area than
now, that we knew so so many more people, because then we went to school
together, and even if we didn't go to church together we sometimes did things
together as churches, and we played on and against each other in sports teams,
and we had civic groups, and we had teachers and law enforcement and even
medical professionals and even business owners who actually lived in our
neighborhoods where they worked, and all of that is now gone. Now we have
children from one small neighborhood who may go to ten different schools, some
all across town, some right in their own houses, and more and more they are
being educated by corporations instead of communities.

We have been preaching, and community organizing and resisting
against that, but today it went deeper for me. Today I thought about the tragic
irony of how democracy is being destroyed by the very thing which gave it birth.
As so often what we are successful at carries within it the very seed of what
works against us and our mission. Democracy rose up in the heart as part of
what Harvard historian Conrad Wright called the historical process of
individualism, from the families who moved out of the original close compounds
in early Puritan New England, moved to "the frontier" and began to grow a
culture that fostered individual family units, and individual property rights,
and expected to have individual voices heard in decisions affecting them. Even
moreso, they created a culture of individuals who sought the right, and felt the
responsibility, to voluntarily form associations and communities of
self-governance. But in places where there is not an increasing abundance of
land and opportunities and the ever-presence of "newness", forces that created
individualism and provided it healthy soil, and which then gave rise to
democracy, then the impulse toward individualism and the orientation of life and
our institutions to foster it for its own sake becomes ironically and tragically
the very means for the erosion of democracy which relies not on individuals but
on individuals becoming more than themselves through voluntary associations,
through groups dedicated to the common good, groups that fall under the rubric
of public, of private, of non-profit, and of profit.

The more people experience their lives as being on their own,
especially in areas of struggle and hardships and abandonment, the more
fragmented the sense and reality of community will be, and the less involvement
there will be in the common good, and the less democracy there will be. As the
bumper sticker on the front door of our community center says, "Democracy is not
a Spectator Sport" but so much of our culture and governmental decisions and
corporate decisions are aimed at creating spectators, not activists, and aimed
at pitting the least against one another in a kind of sport. It is one of the
reasons why our neighborhoods have half the voter turnout in percentages of
registered voters than do the neighborhoods on the southside.

This Sunday is not only one day in Memorial Day Weekend; it is
also in the church year, that frame for seeing life in a different and
alternative way, a different time zone so to speak full of different values, it
is the day of Pentecost, the day we celebrate the birthday of the church, the
lifting up of the biblical story of how the fragmented followers of Jesus were
still unsure of their mission, dispirited, fearful, but yet coming together as a
community, because that is something deep down they knew was where their healing
would be; and on that day, the Jewish Festival of Weeks fifty days after
passover, the story recorded in Acts describes God's spirit descending to each
and every one, bringing visions and truth to every one, male and female, young
and old, but in different languages, yet languages they each could understand;
they received a spirit that gave a new birth to their community and to their
mission to bring their good news of liberation and healing to those beyond
themselves.

This Pentecost we need a rebirth of missional understanding to
all of our institutions, not just to the church; we no longer live in a world
where we can continue doing the same thing in the same way as we have been and
expect major different results; all of our institutions need to begin turning
themselves inside out, upside down, and not waiting for people to come to them,
and be like them, but to take their spirit to the people, and to receive back an
even greater spirit from the people they encounter especially in the areas of
greatest struggle and scarcity. We must recreate community, we must resist the
many ways we are encouraged to make our lives primarily about us, and in doing
we will help give a new birth to democracy itself and help it shape not a new
land and new peoples but a renewed land and renewed peoples.

The first step is to do what those followers of Jesus did;
they simply showed up, they came together, for it was an indication of who they
were, and Whose they were. Trust that the Spirit will come, will emerge, once
you show up.

Blessings, thanks for all your work and your partnerships and
your gifts, and as ever, more soon,

Tomorrow, Friday, 9:30 am to noon, Food Pantry. Volunteers
needed. At the Center. Each Tuesday and Friday during those hours.

Tomorrow from 2:30 to 4:30 pm I will be representing us on a
panel about North Tulsa to health department employees who will be working in
our community at the new Wellness Center.

Saturday, at 1:30 pm I will be participating in the Read
Across North Tulsa event at Gilcrease Elementary School, 56th and N. Cincinnati.

Saturday, May 19, from 4 to 7 pm, join us for the kickoff of
our new monthly partnership benefit dinner for each third Saturday, at the
Turley Odd Fellows Lodge, 6227 N. Quincy Ave. this month proceeds go to Susan
Komen for the Cure campaign against breast cancer; each month will benefit a
community group. This month the Odd Fellows will be doing a spaghetti dinner,
suggested minimum $5 for all you care to eat, and $2 for those ten and under.
Every other month A Third Place Foundation will do the meal and use the benefits
for our projects, but this is also a great opportunity to reflect our new
community, to build bridges across ethnic and other lines, by eating together
for and with others. Join us.

Saturday night at Pickles Pub we will be saying goodbye to our
great volunteers and members and board members the Sansone Family as Chris plays
his final concert with the R&B band Built For Comfort, at 42nd and S.
Sheridan, as they take off for the Buffalo, NY area. Concert starts at 8:30 pm.

Next Thursday, May 24, at noon at the Center we will have a
work session to begin building our network of people and resources by specific
areas within our Turley area. Lunch included.

On Tuesday, May 29 there will be the Turley area Town Hall
public meeting at O'Brien Park Recreation Center.

On Thursday, May 31, the neighborhood watch meeting at the
Center at 6:30 pm.

On Saturday, June 2, we have our Board retreat from 9 am to 2
pm, then that evening we will have our annual presence and march in the Tulsa
Pride Parade sponsored by the Oklahoma Equality Center; come join us.

On Thursday, June 7 at 10 am volunteers gather for our next
Food Bank Mobile Van food giveaway, which starts for those with vouchers at 11
am. Come to the pantry to get vouchers for those in the 74126, 74130 and 74073
zip.

Saturday, June 9, I will be giving the keynote address and a
workshop on our work here to the North Texas Areas Unitarian Universalists in
the Dallas area at Horizon Church. The address is called "One Mission, Many
Communities" and will be an introduction to the missional church movement. Our
Sunday gatherings on good weather days have been at the park for study and
communion and common meal beginning at 9:30 am. Check at the Center first to see
if we are there or up at the park nearby, or call me at 9186913223. Eastertide
is continuing. Last week for Mother's Day too we had a great bible study and
conversation on radical women and mothers in Jesus' genealogy, and on the nature
of the bible in our spiritual lives, and the hard passages where we need to
speak back against what is in the Bible in order to uphold its deeper truths.

Thank you for your partnerships and for your help. We need
your support for our work now more than ever. We have finished with phase one of
the gardenkitchenpark, with just a few small projects left, and so we have used
in mission all of our grant funding, and are now back on memberships, on
fundraisers, and special donations. It has been an incredible year of outreach
and expansion for us.

We have given more money away to schools in our area this year
in response to all the cutbacks in public education, and we have and continue to
lobby for keeping the interests of neighborhoods in mind, especially our most
vulnerable neighborhoods, in decisions made about the schools. We want to expand
even further by using Cherokee School which has been closed to the community for
a year. We want to use it for a place of seniors and youth meals and community
events. We want to continue expanding our support of McLain school, of the new
Lighthouse Charter School where Horace Greeley has been which we have been
partnering with this past year especially, and with the Gicrease School where
the regular public school students in our area will now go.

We have expanded the gardenpark of course and with some more
work there we will be ready to move on to raising funds to create a
greenhouse/kitchen/shelter/storage/rainwatercollection building, and other
natural projects for people to use to build relationships while growing food
together.

We have expanded the food justice events and our pantry
program is one of the best in the state; we help people connect to other
resources; we provide a listening ear; we help them with food; we teach them how
to take the food and make healthy meals from it; and we encourage them to give
back to others even as they are receiving from others. Our mobile van food days
every other month reach out to hundreds. We have added a part time staff person
to help us with the pantry. Our clothing room that adjoins our pantry has been
helped by our volunteers who are giving back for what they have received, and it
is looking better and serving more than ever before.

We have held holiday parties and festivals for hundreds this
past program year since last summer. And since the wildfires of last summer we
have taken the lead in reorganizing a planning group to address the deep issues
of our community needs, such as disaster relief and incorporation and attracting
new residents and new businesses and working to help those already here. Because
of that this summer we will begin work on creating and institutionalizing our
Future of Turley work by creating a special development association to Grow
Turley!

In many ways we seek to grow ourselves and our community by
balancing our growth inward and outward. Many of the projects we undertake now
are never known publicly; they are in partnerships and helping others in our
community and their groups to grow with us, or helping one on one people and
groups; much of our planning coming up will be how we can continue to build our
own inner foundations through finances and people power and partnerships in
order that we can sustain the phenomenol amount of outward mission we do in the
community; much of our church work will be geared this coming year to providing
resources for people to grow in their own spiritual formation in order that they
may better serve others. It is such a blessing to have people moving into our
community, or relocating their passions and extra time, to working with us and
becoming a part of us on a regular basis; these leaders will be helping us to
grow more this coming year, through this summer of incubation, both inward and
outward.

Thank you for those of you who have helped with your
individual donations, with getting your churches to take up a plate offering for
our ministry here, or who are sending us opportunities for grants and new
partnerships. In the midst of great scarcity and needs, we hold on to your acts
of abundance with great love and gratitude, and though we don't say it enough,
not nearly enough, all that happens here happens because of you. And if you have
been reading these epistles from an abandoned place of Empire and felt the
calling to send us some resources, or come for a visit, please get in touch with
us, and pass on the opportunity to donate to us at www.turleyok.blogspot.com We shock people
sometimes in our workshops by talking about our radical sense of grace, how we
intentionally go from zero to zero in our bank books month by month, trusting
that more will be given so that we can give it away and show those around us
that our world even in its poverty is a place of great plenty, of enough; we are
in that situation again; we, however, don't like to stay at zero lol; we just
like to end up there each month. Be a part of our adventure in faithfulness and
mission. Help us keep surprising the world.

Finally, our sympathies to a wonderful friend and community
leader, Notes Richardson who worked at O'Brien Park Recreation Center and who
died suddenly at home this past Sunday; we had just visited with him at the
dedication of the Linda Taylor basketball court a few days before, commemorating
another of our community leaders who we have lost in this past year that has
been marked by so many deaths of those working with us and in our community:
Michael Niles, Joe Sanders, Steve Eberle, Gwen Goff, Linda Taylor, my own mother
Mickey, and others in our community, and now Nolan Richardson III; their spirits
continue to deepen our own and turn us to lifting the spirits of others. At this
coming time of Memorial Day, we will have much to remember and re-dedicate
ourselves too.

In a world with a
thousand broadcast channels, in a world where a phone is rarely a phone but a
portal to the universe, in a world where books and movies and people come to me
on a screen wherever I go, in a Google-made world overlaying a Gutenberg-made
world, in a world where viral and contagious and tribal are affirmations, in a
world of social solitude, in a world where hot dogs are stuffed into pizza, yet
a world where a growing number of children don’t know how to eat a meal that doesn’t
come to them in a single serving self-contained package handed to them, in such
a world it should be no surprise that Church must become expressed in a much broader
bandwidth of communities, including the missional communities I will describe.

A broader bandwidth
means just that; a broadening out, not a replacement for, not a new model
church replacing church as we have known and loved it and hated it. It means church
doesn’t have to be alike and bless the world alike either; in fact, if we do
continue to have a monoculture of what is required to be church, we will not be
able to bless but a quickly shrinking segment of the world that is attracted to
that culture.

To forge a bigger bandwidth of church, the
church first needs to forget itself, its anxieties, its identity crisis, its
own needs to change, and focus instead on what it takes to change the hurting
world right around it, to become its change agent. This is an ancient/new role for church which
is now a cultural outsider rather than insider as it was in the modern age. The
mission of the church in that setting was to be what we often called “being a
beacon.” Which is another way of saying look to us, at us, be like us, and we
will save you from the stormy seas of the world.

But then, not so very long ago, that context
and that dynamic changed. And we are struggling to understand and live out the
change, that church is not insider, not beacon, not ultimately even a safe
harbor, fair haven, but church is the
already shipwrecked persons creating rafts from the wreckage itself and forming
community while searching and rescuing others, resisting the waves and the tide
in order to remain in the stormy sea until all are found.

I.The Default Mode of Church

It happened on a Sunday
night in 1963, in Greenville, South Carolina, when the Fox Theater, despite
opposition, began showing movies on Sundays, just at night. That moment in that
place has come to mark the end of the churched culture in the United States. That
event in Greenville was scandalous; imagine if they then could have seen ahead
to our Sundays now and what competition congregations face for people’s allegiance.

I use that signature 1963 moment as a
stereotypical generational boundary timeline dividing default modes of what we
think about when we think about church. Those like me who were born before that
event [I asked for a show of hands of how many present were born before 1963;
some 99 percent of the hands in the pews were raised]might in our mind’s eye
not only have a fairly uniform image of church, despite our individual
different histories, but we will also have a deep imprint of the place of
church in society, which affects our understanding of church and mission.

Our default of church
is as a set aside place, a what, an It, a special looking building, with a name
on it that tells you it belongs to others like it, with a main room where
people gather for an hour or so once a week and do a thing called worship and
Sunday school and listen to someone speak for a big portion of that time, all supported
by a legally constituted organization with leaders and members and
multi-generational families, above all as a group one comes into, either by
birth or by choice.

The prevailing church
model today does much good in the world, and will continue to do so. But what I
want to leave you with today is that no matter how good the congregation and
its people are, and no matter how much it grows in number as well as in
vitality, that fewer and fewer percentages of people in the world around the
congregation are likely to be attracted to it—though still hungry for spiritual
depth and connection and service. The pool, or mission field, of people who
seek to be nourished by a congregation, any congregation, will shrink, and the
competition by congregations for them will be fierce, cutting across
denominational and religious lines as we are already seeing, with the already
haves having the upper hand in landing the potential new members.

The good news in that situation
is that this new environment, this new spiritual landscape, in this so-called unchurched
world, post denominational world, and now post congregational world, this
change is opening up whole new ways and niches of being church. Especially for
those who can turn vulnerability under the old default mode into becoming
vanguards in the new broader bandwidth.

The church’s new
measuring stick will be how it grows the world’s vitality and resources rather
than its own. How many beyond itself is it serving? Not how many are serving
it. How will it be able to connect with those growing percentages who are
unreachable by congregations. In a given week now 65 percent of people in their
70s and above are in a congregation; for baby boomers the number is 35 percent;
for Gen Xers it is 15 percent and for Millenials, some of whom are already at
30 years old, it is 4 percent [from Mike Breen in Launching Missional
Communities]. And due to the culture shift from churched to unchurched, with
the highly competitive marketplace churches are in now,there is not projected to be the kind of
return to church as younger generations age, as was the case in the past. To
survive will mean embodying discontinuity with the past [radical discontinuity
says church consultant and author Lyle Schaller].

So, if they aren’t
coming to church, the missional church says, go to them. Quit thinking of the
church as a what, as an It, and remember it is a Who. Church is at heart not a
501c3 religious organization; it can and
has existed, in ancient and emerging times, without bylaws, boards, budgets,
and buildings, and clergy. Church does not have to be thought of as “a” church,
that one “goes to” on the corner of this and that, and is even named a certain
thing, but church can be lived out organically as a way people, two or more at
a time, especially in covenant, participate as expressions of “the church.”
Imagine. Church anywhere, anytime.

For Church does not
have to be only in the mode of help an us to become bigger and better, more
competitive, where people despite our best intentions become the means to some
organizational end; to seek that is to follow the default mode of consumerism, to
give allegiance to the Empire which is always seeking to co-opt the church, now
as in the days of Rome, to subsume it with the controlling worldview that says
the quality and meaning of life is about what you have and can get, not just in
things either, but also in terms of appearance and achievement and personal
power and the ability to tap easily into a wealth of choices and experiences
especially those that are “cool” “hot” “trendy”, and that what you give is of
secondary importance, something you do with your disposable time, talents, and
treasure. (Believe me if the prevailing quality of life standard was to live so
as to be able to give easily and naturally and neighborly, then my zipcode would
be booming and not busting). Church
doesn’t have to be about attracting and extracting people from one environment,
at great expense, and placing them in our environment, always worrying they
will leave us, becoming Pepsi people not Coke people; church can be about
turning outwards, helping others grow, serving the ends of others, giving
ourselves away, incarnating who we are into the greater life, and of course
always inviting others to do so with us, and nurturing leaders to keep this
movement alive. (That nurture part is why spiritual direction is companion to
mission; both take more seriously the need of going inward and going outward at
the same time).

I.Missional Examples

So, exactly, what is
this bigger bandwidth of church looking like as it seeks to respond to the
growing diverse frequencies of the world?

There is the 3 am
coffeeshop church for those on the nightshift. There is the café church that
sells its food for whatever people wish to pay, and who gather for study and
worship in the café. There is the church that sends and pays for two couples to
move into an apartment complex, one of the great unchurched areas of our
culture, to live and form relationships and study and worship in the clubhouse.
There is the house church with two couples sharing the residence and who
organize a community garden for their neighborhood. There is the church of 80
who can’t fund their minister full time and sustain their building so they
divide into 8 groups of ten based on their residential geography and these
become eight new congregations who meet together once a month for bigger
worship, and the pastor moved into a poor neighborhood and worked part time at
a car repair shop so he could scale back or eliminate his paid ministry,
turning it into connecting and coaching the different small groups; over time
his parishoners also began downsizing and moving into the neighborhood with
him.

There is the movement
of so-called new friars, a few families who move into urban slum areas around
the world, and let their simple living and serving their new neighbors be a
witness to their faith. There are the new monastics who live in co-housing or in
proximity to one another and who eat together and help one another and serve others
throughout the week together, especially in the poorest areas of a community,
and who worship together daily or several times a week. There is the large
church that takes its established small groups and turns them loose to become missional
groups---meeting weekly. One missional
group may primarily be related to one school or one neighborhood or one
apartment complex, or an even smaller segment of those, even one family to one
family, one person to one person. There are the organic churches who are at
most 16 to 20 people and who meet weekly in groups of 4 for sharing and serving
in life transformation groups with one of them intentionally leaving to start a
new group of 4. There are churches who meet in bars, parks, restaurants,
bookstores, after movies, during lunch at work, in tutoring students at school.
But the question arises: is that really “a
church”? The answer is that the question still assumes modernity’s definition
and emphasis on “a” this or that thing, like a taxonomy, something that can be
affixed, known, named, organized. When what is happening is not “a church” but
manifestations of “the church.”

Despite the varieties
of missional communities, they each find a way to carry out the four focuses of
becoming church: mission, discipleship, community, and worship. They serve
others together (mission), they study together (discipleship), they eat
together and care for one another and build ties with one another (community)
and they worship together, either by conducting their own worship in small groups,
or with a cluster of groups, or with their own larger church, their sending
church, or by going to worship with others in their churches, as a way of
relating to more people and participating in a worship they could not with
their size create.

One of my favorite
stories of radical missional church incarnation is from Michael Frost’s book
Exiles, about the young adult who had attention deficit disorder and had always
found it difficult to sit still in the pews with his family during worship, and
so when he became an adult it dawned on him that he really didn’t have to go to
worship anymore as he had in the past in the congregational setting, so he went
with friends to the lake on Sundays. But he felt a little guilty and he wanted
to be spiritually nourished so while he was partying at the lake he asked his
friends, most who had not had his church background, if he could take a moment
to pray and he asked them if they had anything he could include in his own
prayers, and he went on partying. The next Sunday he brought his Bible and took
a few minutes to do the same, adding in a brief reading, and then he went on
partying. Not taking more than a few minutes at first. But then he and his
friends started adding more prayers, and they started doing small acts of
service at the lake, cleaning up, towing boats, and then they sat at picnic
tables and had bread and juice for communion alongside the burgers and the
beer, and wove spiritual issues into their conversations. Still, it was a
party; still, his family pestered him to “come back to church.” Imagine such an
organic expression of church being seeded intentionally?

II.The Welcome Table missional community
and A Third Place Community Foundation

Finally, in exploring
varieties of missional church, noticing how they are fundamentally different
from an existing church that does a lot of good in the community (though that
is part of the bigger bandwidth; we need more of those churches, and they can
find ways to be even more a part of the transformation of their communities;
perhaps just taking boards and committees and worship outside of the building
and into relationship with others more; by giving more and more of their plate
offering away; by forming non-profit foundations to partner with others easier
and to tackle specific missions), there are those like us.

In the workshop this
afternoon I will go into more specifics, into what I love to talk about the
nuts and bolts of our failures and current struggles, because another marker of
the new measurement for success is how often you are failing, as a sign of how
much you are risking, but our story is that we decided we exist not to attract
like-minded or common values people into a warm supportive community of our own
(though we think we are one) from which we would do projects in the community,
but that we exist for the healing transformation of our immediate
neighborhoods, ones which have the lowest income and lowest life expectancy in
our area, 14 years lower life expectancy than in the highest area just six
miles from us. We asked that all important question: if we ceased to exist,
would our neighbors notice, and would it affect their lives in meaningful ways?
[see Missional Renaissance, by Reggie McNeal]. So five years ago we took down
the signs that said we were a church and when we worshipped, and we moved out
of our small rented space and we moved into a much larger rented space across
the street at a higher lease we had no certainty we could pay for; and there we
re-emerged as a free community center with a library, computer center, food
pantry, health clinic, clothing and giveaway room, meeting space for community
events and parties we threw for free, and where the community was invited to
come voice their hurts, dreams, disappointments, visions, and there connect
with one another and with our partner groups. We still worshipped, often more
times than we had before, and in various ways, but our gatherings were right
there in the center, sometimes even as other activities were happening; we
became a guest in our space given away for others, or we worshipped out in the
places of the community we were working on, our blight to beauty sites, or our
community gardens we had started, or we worshipped with other churches.

Since then, we created
a non-profit foundation (A Third Place) with others in our community from a
variety of faiths to handle the organizational matters and help us do more with
our neighbors. Such as purchasing a city block of abandoned trashed and burned
out homes and turning that space into a community garden and orchard and park
to produce healthy food for our unhealthy area. It too is becoming another
public space for community to happen among people who otherwise wouldn’t
connect, in an area of great ethnic diversity at a time of polarization and
violence; it was our zipcode that was in the world news lately for the Good
Friday racially motivated killings; both the white shooters and all but one of
the black victims lived in our area, a two mile radius from our center, which
is our focus, our parish. A Third Place is called that, as a part of a global
third spaces or places movement to reclaim public spaces for the common good,
where people who are different from one another can meet and create together;
the first place isyour home, the second
place is your work or church or civic group where you are with people who think
like you; but the world needs more third places, where cross cultural life is
nurtured.

And we have bought the
largest abandoned building, at the time, in our area, an old church complex
that had been rundown and vandalized, and we have moved the community center
and programs into it, expanding our food pantry by doing so, and making the
building such as it is an asset again, and keeping our money turning over in
our community rather than going to a landlord who lived outside our area. Our
food pantry gives out sometimes 11,000 pounds of food in a month. We also have
coordinated the daily summer free lunches for more children in our area than
anywhere else in our town, and we put on free community celebrations that
uplift and feed hundreds of people and provide free entertainment in an area
where no venues exist.

We are a tiny
group—sometimes four to a dozen worshipping together—but we partner with many
and are always looking for ways to incarnate ourselves in and with others, and
we have our hearts and hands and heads in coordinating everything in our
community from food to parks to the schools to health projects to streets to
trash to crime prevention to animal welfare to disaster response planning to working
on incorporating part of our community that isn’t so it can have more of a
voice and seat at the table. We see ourselves as The Church of Another World is
Possible in this abandoned place of Empire. And we are all volunteers, so far;
we are hoping to change that.

Well, that is all well
and good, some say, but what does that have to do with church? How are you not
just like another social service?

Well, I answer, I wish
we didn’t have to be doing what we are doing. I wish there wasn’t such places
like ours. I wish other renewal groups were active here; I wish government was
funded to an extent where it could do its job here; I wish the businesses here
cared more about the people’s lives beyond the time they are in their stores; I
wish the few small churches here weren’t so fragile and in scarcity mode
themselves and were more socially justice oriented and just plain helping your
neighbor oriented. And I wish that more of my neighbors would help us and give
back to others and build community with us too; we wouldn’t need any financial
assistance from outside our own area, even with the poverty we have, if others
living here too weren’t wasting their money on addictions; I wish they didn’t
have to wear themselves out trying to find work, or to get healthy, or caring
for multiple generations so that they could give more of themselves.

But none of that is
happening, and there are people hurting, and community at risk.

III.The Church Doesn’t Have A Mission;
The Mission Has A Church

And here is the radical
turning point of missional church, and the turning point for this sermon: I
believe the mission of the church is at heart about serving, saving, the most
vulnerable of our neighbors; and if your neighbors aren’t vulnerable (though I
bet they are in many ways; as my wife Bonnie says, the people in the wealthy
suburbs have power but don’t know they have needs; the people in our area know
they have needs but not that they have power; it is harder work in many ways to
get the powerful to know they are in need) and you can’t figure out a way to
give yourself away to them then you should move to a different neighborhood. I
believe the church should not be growing more vital and healthy when the world
around it is dying. I don’t believe the mission of the church is to attract
more people to think like us, and lord knows its not the mission of the church
to make more people who call themselves Unitarian Universalists, or call
themselves Christian either, for example; if that happens as a byproduct of
fulfilling our mission, then well and good; but it isn’t why we exist and the
more we make it our focus, the more we worry about church even, as an institution
and organization, the more we lose sight of our calling to love and shape the
world bent out of shape, and the more we will just end up paralyzing the church
anyway with anxiety. It is why I didn’t call this sermon ReShaping the Church,
because you start with the need to ReShape the World and let that guide what
kind of church is created to help carry out that task. It is the same reason we
say The Church Does Not Have A Mission; The Mission Has or Creates The Church.
That’s why the Mission remains the same while the forms of church vary in order
to better respond to the Mission. Always seeking to change your mission, and
god forbid always seeking to change a mission statement, like you change
bylaws, or leaders, is to never know your purpose and to avoid commitment to
it.

Is your church's mission just to get more people to think
alike, even to have a like approach to religious issues? In hopes that this
alone will create a beloved community? Is it to attract those who already think
alike, e.g. are already religious liberals or spiritual progressives, but just
don't know yet about your church, or just don't know yet about all the benefits
they could receive from being a member of your faith community? So they can get
support for thinking a certain way?Do we want our churches to just grow as
echo chambers in a world that needs more “edge” places, those boundary margin
lines where habitats converge and life is most abundant and creative? Do we
think we can best change our world by having bigger churches of the like minded
religiously? Who are fed by message and not by mission? Is what we do on Sunday
really changing Monday life? Do we put our trust in an approach that thinking rightly
will lead to right action, just as we hope that worship will lead to service?

The mission calls our church not to get
bigger so we can put on more programs and better worship to grow liberal minds.
But instead the mission calls the church to grow the soul of the neighborhoods
and lives around us, outside of us, and as we do that, in relationship with
those very different from us, we trust that what guides us and inspires us will
grow too.

IV.The Progressive Struggle to be
Missional

But we also struggle as
missional progressives because of the very church and culture in which we have
been nurtured as progressives. Not only do we have that default mode to contend
with about a one church model fits all, but there are aspects of progressive or
liberal faith, some might say its very core, which make it hard to grow
missionally. Our faith, or at least our church manifestations, are rooted and
have their DNA in the modern age and culture; the problem is, the air and
livable environment of that age and culture is quickly being sucked away.
Congregations as we know them now were at home, perhaps too at home, in that
age and culture of modernity. They struggle in the new air and environment of
that which is growing up around them as a kind of post modernity. Likewise
missional communities were the anomalies of the modern age, but they are
thriving in this new culture.

Pay attention to this
quote from "Understanding North American Culture" chapter two of the
groundbreaking work, Missional Church; this section written by Craig Van
Gelder: "Freely choosing, autonomous individuals, deciding out of rational
self-interest to enter into a social contract in order to construct a
progressive society, became the central ideology of modernity." Read it once
again.
So much of us fits that description to a tee. Our churches are embedded in modernity.
Our liberal theology, as Gary Dorrien
pointed out in his trilogy of history on American liberal religion, has its DNA
the middle ground, a mediating message, between the orthodox right and the
non-religious left, to simplify it; but that stance means liberals are prone to
be in reacting mode, balancing, one foot weighted one direction and the other
foot weighted the other, always worried about identity, always trying to get
the Message right, and all that energy saps mission.

Missional church is embedded
in a different culture, though still navigating through the wreckage of
modernity. Its historical DNA is not in Reformation and Renaissance and
Enlightenment. Its roots are deeper than Plymouth, deeper than Wittenberg or
Geneva, deeper than Rome. I find them in the pre-church, pre-Christian even, radical
meal fellowship events growing out of and connected in ways to Jesus, but where
there were no qualifiers placed on who was served, and where a new image of God
sustained them.
And, If I were talking to my missional brothers and sisters from more orthodox
communities today, I would challenge them to see the gifts of progressive faith
for their ministry. We have experience
on how to engage with all of the world, in all its pluralisms, that the
non-progressive missionals need in order to better know and love the world and
become the church in the process.
So, to reframe van Gelder’s summation of
modernity and put it in postmodern missional ways: we are not freely choosing;
we have a calling, in some sense experience ourselves as having been Chosen,
created by the Mission; we are not autonomous individuals but are inherently
and primarily relational and communal persons, finding deeper definitions of
freedom in that; we are not entering into community out of rational
self-interest but struggling to give up ego and to give one's self to all that
the culture of consumerism and self and nationalism says does not make sense; we
are covenanting to imitate and in doing so help initiate the "empire of
God" or beloved communitas, that way community turns outward not inward
upon us.

V.Likeness To A Different Image of God

The nature of church,
though, is not created in a vacuum; it is connected and grows ultimately out of
how we view the nature of God (even if our view is to see an absence there).
For how we see and depict the nature of God will shape how we see the nature of
Nature or Creation itself, which shapes how we see the nature of humanity,
which shapes how we see the nature of evil and suffering, which shapes how we
see the nature of what is restorative, healing, saving, from which the mission
of the church is grown.

For me the epitome of modernity’s
God is reflected in the William Ellery Channing 1828 sermon Likeness To God. We
have often looked at this sermon as a foundational understanding of how our
tradition elevates a theological anthropology, or human nature, as its starting
point, from which today we use the terms inherent worth and dignity of all as
our first principle. But the human nature Channing defends, and commits to
building a church around supporting, is what it is because of the nature of the
God he sees. The title of the sermon is drawn from the famous words of Genesis
that we are made in the likeness of God; and ever since religious leaders have
been wrestling to figure out what that likeness is; often not wrestling enough,
but looking in the mirror and finding the likeness there. The orthodox
Calvinists of his time, against whom Channing was preaching, saw humanity’s
likeness to God as destroyed in the Fall of Adam, and only possible of
obtaining again through the atoning work of Christ (a position many of the
Universalists of the time also took, though they would argue that the atoning
work had been done and for all). Channing’s sermons here and elsewhere lifted
up the truth that the likeness to God was something we too could help
cultivate, create, especially as we focus on the “essential capacities of the
Mind.” His image of God was one of Mind. And God’s greatest gift is how God
communicates his self. (See how the church of modernity resembles the God of
modernity? With a focus on the self, on the mind, on communicating a message?).
God to the modern is ultimate knowledge; is what all is attracted toward; is
the brightest and most honorable, the highest good; and proof of God is even in
us; so wouldn’t church made in the likeness to this God also be about us, our
goodness? Channing, while stating that God is to be seen in nature, puts the
focus on us as the viewer, and states that we should care more for our own
spirit than for all the outward world. And Channing goes on to state even that
we know what the image of God is because we can know our own soul; to see God
see ourselves, the way parents and children resemble one another. The Rev. Carl
Scovel, in his lecture Beyond Channing and Church, is right that Channing’s
image of God, and Jesus, is something akin to a benevolent Boston merchant,
that there is little of the radical nature there that calls us to upend our
lives and overturn the powers and principalities of this world. But that is
because Channing, in his historical moment of change, was reflecting the God of
modernity against those who were still forming their lives in likeness to the
God of a medieval culture.

Yet Channing is right,
and right for our times, when in that sermon he says you cannot and should not
sever the connection between Creator and creatures. This is a key insight for
the missional church; it is why the missional church challenges how we have
separated faith from daily living, confined it as church to certain times and
places and certain people. The real problem for us, though, a church made in
the likeness to Channing’s likeness to God, is not the inherent connection of
God and humanity but it is the attributes ascribed to God, that God is found in
Abstraction--beauty, truth and goodness, glory and honor and intelligence.
Church made for those attributes does not get dirty in my zip code, the 74126;
it is the kind of church that sends its buses into my neighborhood to collect
people to take them across town to make them feel good and safe, unlike those
left behind, and then it drops them back off to their abandoned blocks and
un-neighborly-hood; or it is the kind of church that never comes into the zip
code in the first place because of fear or of shame, or the people here do not
think, vote, look, or listen to the same media as them.

In Channing’s sermon,
his radical break-through was reclaiming the divine nature of the creature; much
needed for his time. Now, for the missional church there is a reclaiming of the
human nature of the Creator, or at least that we meet God in very different
ways and people and places than before; that to be filled with the divine, to
partner with God, is to go be where that liberating spirit—call is the
Transcendent, The Goddess, the Human Spirit, or something else—where it is
already present and transforming the world, especially in the abandoned places
and people, in the areas of poverty and shame and despair; don’t worry about
what to call it, but worry that it is calling you to go be with others without
trying to make them like us, without trying to get them into our doors.

For the missional church, God has changed
sides, and so the church must do the same to follow God. It is why the
missional church wakes up in the morningand thinks: where can I go find God in the neighborhood? Not how can I
get more of the neighborhood to come on Sunday and find God here?

Channing actually helped
prepare the way for this. From modernity’s emphasis on the mind and scholarship
and freedom from dogma and the separation from religion only being the purview
of the church, and from the rise of historical and biblical scholarship through
the academy as well as through the progressive church, because of that we have
begun to be able to reclaim a different perspective on God, to experience the
paradoxical power of the Vulnerable God, one different than was available to
Channing. Particularly we now have again in our midst the paradigm exploding
parables of Jesus, told at those radical meal fellowship events, and how they
reveal a very different image of God, for us to follow and form communities in
likeness to. In Channing’s time, parables were predominantly used as
platitudes, but now we know they reveal the heart of mission, which was to
imitate and initiate the kingdom of God as a counterweight, an alternate world,
to the prevailing kingdom of Rome and its ways. As now the new Rome is the new
American Dream consumer marketplace Entertainment Empire spreading a false
notion of quality of life; against it is God’s Dream of justice, where, in the
words of the theologian Jorgen Moltmann, the opposite of poverty is not
property and wealth; the opposite of both poverty and property is community.

Jesus said God is like
leaven, which a woman stole, and hid in three measures of flour until it was
all corrupted. God is no longer in the pure but the impure, not in what makes
us holy and to be kept apart (sound like any church you know?), but God is in
the midst of the outsider, the scandalous, the wastefulness as the world judges
what is of worth. So too should be the church. Jesus said God is like mustard
seed that a man took and threw in a garden and it took over and grew wild and
tall so that birds could nest in it. So, God is then no longer in the orderly,
presentable, measurable, tidy and controllable; God is what breaks out of the
neat boxes in which we try to put our lives, and church. God is what we get
lost in. Jesus said God is like a woman who carrying a jar of meal and the jar
has a hole in it she doesn’t know about and all the meal spills out behind her
along the road, and when she gets home she discovers the jar is empty. Period.
So, God is no longer in what becomes full, in what we can see and touch and
make our own and feel good about, in feeding ourselves and our own; God is that
moment when we must face absence and emptiness and must choose upon what we
base our life, our church.

Church made in the
likeness to this different God is a different church indeed. It is these
parables that we have used as our touchstones in Turley/NorthTulsa, our TNT
zone, for who we hang out with (felons, recovering addicts, the left behind,
all of whom are a big part of our volunteers), and where we spend our time,
what our priorities are. Putting church under the radar, letting it be like
leaven, except the corruption we seek to spread through our service with others
is the corruption of hope and community and of giving back when so much around
us is defining quality of life as what one can get and have, can hoard.

Jesus said God is the
Samaritan, the one different from us, who saves us, when we have been left to
die. So church go meet the Samaritan on the road.Church, let the world save you. Jesus said
God is the party that is thrown for the prodigal younger son, who may leave
again in the light of morning. God is the mothering father of that parable who
has one eye always on the world beyond, lamenting who is lost, and who doesn’t
mind shaming himself in the eyes of the world that believes prestige and power
and honor and community reputation are the marks of divinity. So, too, the
church today is like the elder brother in that parable, who at the end is left out
in his field alone, a choice before him to make: does he remain there apart
from all others, waiting for them to come to him, does he remain alone in his
very real sense of his own rightness, with a firm grasp on his own truth, or
does he get over himself and go to the party and experience the God of
relationship and endless possibilities? Church, doyou have eyes to see, and ears to hear?

Jesus’ parables shook
up his world by re-engaging and reimagining his world, by reimagining God in
his world. It was a new consciousness, a new way of being in the world, says
parables scholar Brandon Scott, who wrote, “The God Jesus hides in the parables
identifies with a polluted world, not the world of the temple…” (Reimaging The
World, by Bernard Brandon Scott). This new way of being didn’t require membership
in a special group then, under a special name or with a special set of beliefs,
in order to participate in it, and it doesn’t require that today either. That’s
part of its radical mission-centered way. You don’t have to be a Christian; you
don’t have to think certain things about God, or use the language I am using, in fact those things if you aren’t careful can
stand in the way, can hinder creating community committed to the very mission
of this God of difference.

Conclusion: The Shadows
of What Once Was That Hold Our Gaze

I am a child of the
church, and of the churched culture, and of the modern age itself in which the
church was embedded and which the church helped to create. I am a child of
Channing; it was encountering his work in college that led me to Unitarianism
which led me to Universalism. And on all accounts, I often now feel like an
orphan. I can lament with the best of them how things used to be. It is ironic
that by far the most active Facebook group I am in, facebook which is that
embodiment of the new culture itself shaping us, is the facebook group for people
talking about the old neighborhoods, old schools, teachers and friends, and the
old world in which we once lived. Who remembers this? We ask one another. It is the question of our age at this hinge of
history, one that has implications far beyond personal nostalgia; we are
growing real communal ties around what is no longer with us except in our minds,
instead of growing community around what might be, especially where it is
needed most.

That world in which I
was grown (hear the passive tense, was grown)—church being so much a part of
it—has gone away and left its sudden shadow that seeks to keep us attached to
it, that still holds our gaze, like the shadows of people going about their
daily lives now burned onto the walls of Hiroshima in the atomic blast that
killed the actual people themselves. Those simple things and ways we took for
granted now seem sacred, in large measure because they are no more or seem so
endangered. So it is with church. We have moved as a society from churched to
unchurched and de-churched culture. Church itself has moved into a post-denominational
culture that challenges how we are known. And now church is entering a
post-congregational culture that challenges us with why and how we gather and
what we do when we are together. Much is passing away right before our eyes, much
that is very very good and has done very good things in the world and people’s
lives, but is slipping through our grasping fingers, and quickly becoming only
memories that we are also steadily, inexorably, losing, all of this calling
into question our very identity. Which is also a very, very good thing. Because
even deeper than being a child of the church and of the culture, we need
reminders that we are children of something Greater than these, something that
can shape these and us. William Ellery Channing used a simple biblical text to open
his Likeness To God sermon; it was Ephesians chapter 5 verse 1: Be ye therefore,
imitators of God, as dear children. One contemporary translation of that is:
Wake up from your sleep: watch what God does and then you do it.

My mother, a theologian
of few words unlike her son, used to say: be careful what you imitate; you
might become it. Be careful what face you make and show to others; it might
freeze.

Prayer: Spirit of Life
that bring us freedom, to change sides too, shape us with your transforming
healing loving liberating Presence beyond our words to capture but at loose in
our world, in unexpected places and people and ways, reshaping it, in small
acts of justice done with great love, calling for us to use our freedom, and
the gift of this new world, to become church, partners, co-creators, in and for
the Mission of the ages: to bring good news to the poor. To set the oppressed
free. For the blind to see, the hungry to be fed, the thirsty to have drink,
the naked to be clothed, the sick to be healed, the prisoner to be visited, and
the stranger to be the host. Amen.

[A few parts of this left out of the oral presentation too were a discussion of how the missional church fits into the tradition of congregationalism via the Cambridge Platform of 1648, its radical revision of the doctrine of the church, and the Calvinist conception of the Invisible Church; also the tradition within the Unitarian Universalist church history of being missional, as in Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the church as community center approach of the Abraham Lincoln Center in Chicago, and the various community churches in urban areas; but also how we have been moved by the work of other traditions, such as Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement and houses of hospitality, and Clarence Jordan and Koinonia in Georgia in the 1940s, John Perkins and the Christian Community Development Association, as well as Shane Claiborne and others in the new monastic movement.)